A Distributed Coordination Approach to Reconfigurable Process Control

Nirav Chokshi is a Visiting Researcher with the Centre for Distributed Automation and Control at the University of Cambridge. He has worked in the chemical industry and the nuclear industry, where he was involved in a variety of small-to-medium scale projects on design and maintenance of process automation systems. His research interests include distributed automation, systems integration and process optimization and control. Duncan McFarlane is a Professor of Service and Support Engineering at the Engineering Department of the University of Cambridge, and Head of the Distributed Information & Automation Laboratory within the Institute for Manufacturing. He is also Director of the Cambridge Auto-ID Lab and Research Director of two industrially supported activities: the Service and Support Engineering Programme and the Aero ID Programme. He has been involved in the design and operation of automation and information system for the manufacturing supply chain for twenty years. His research interests include manufacturing control & automation, modular manufacturing systems design, analysis and synthesis of co-operative control systems, information filtering, model tuning and adaptation, manufacturing systems integration, fault diagnostics, automated identification systems, quality control, and supply chain execution systems.

Problem Development.- Reconfigurable Process Control Research.- A Distributed Reconfigurable Process Control Approach.- DRPC: Distributed Reconfigurable Process Control.- Reconfigurable Process Control Architecture.- An Interaction Model for Reconfigurable Process Control.- A Distributed Algorithm for Reconfigurable Process Control.- An Assessment of the DRPC Approach.- Application of Distributed Coordination Approach — A Case Example.- Conclusions.